For many merchants, particularly those that conduct business while travelling or at a large facility where distributed customer service is advantageous, it is desirable to conduct point-of-sale commercial transactions. Likewise, for others, such as law enforcement officials, it may be necessary or helpful to be able to transmit information, e.g., a suspect's fingerprint or driver's license information, from a portable field device.
Previous systems designed to transmit input information to a remote location for processing a commercial transaction have largely involved non-mobile systems. For example, retail stores commonly have credit card reading terminals that a cashier can use to swipe a credit card. Information encoded in a magnetic stripe on the credit card is received by the reader and transmitted to a remote credit card processing computer over the public switched telephone network (PSTN). However, these terminals are fixed to a particular location by the need for access to PSTN connections. Accordingly, they are impractical for use in commercial transactions that take place in the field.
Attempts to incorporate the functionality of credit card readers and other input devices into wireless telephones are hampered by drawbacks in functionality, power consumption, portability and ease of use. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,729,591 to Bailey and assigned to Virtual Fonlink, Inc. describes a cellular telephone with an integrated magnetic stripe reader. Because in most cases, the functionality provided by the additional input devices is not used as frequently as the standard voice communication functionality of the telephone, the processing power and software required to interface with the additional input devices is not utilized during most telephone operations. Accordingly, using integrated telephones for this purpose is inordinately expensive. It is also unnecessarily unwieldy for the user to utilize the telephone for its originally intended non-transactional purpose (i.e., placing or receiving a telephone call). Moreover, if the user wishes to upgrade the telephone handset, the input devices and associated components must also be discarded.
Similar to the integrated system described in the Bailey patent, U.S. Pat. No. 5,850,599 to Seiderman, describes a cellular telephone in which a magnetic stripe reader is interposed between the handset and the transceiver. By placing the reader in this intermediate position, the user was forced to swipe a credit card in order to use the handset. This system also did not involve a modular attachment. Accordingly, a user would not be able to use the handset without the reader and would be required to replace the reader in order to upgrade the handset.
Previous systems that have incorporated input devices such as magnetic stripe readers and barcode scanners into modular attachment devices have not overcome these cost and functionality disadvantages. U.S. Pat. No. 6,234,389 to Valliani et al. describes an module that may interface with a laptop computer or personal digital assistant (PDA) through a PCMCIA interface. The module may include a magnetic stripe reader for reading standard credit cards, a smartcard reader, a PIN pad unit, a printer, a fingerprint reader and a signature capture unit. However, in both instances, data must be transferred to a processor within the main device (as opposed to the attachment) before being transmitted, either over the wireless network or the PSTN, to the remote computer. Therefore, in the system disclosed in the Valliani et al. patent, the telephone, laptop computer or PDA is still required to satisfy unnecessarily high hardware and software requirements, just as with the integrated systems.
Similarly, an attachment sold under the product name TransAKT is available from Wildcard Wireless Solutions, Inc. of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The pertinent details of the operation of the TransAKT device are described in PCT Application No. PCT/CA98/00357 (International Publication No. WO 98/48522). The attachment may be coupled to the back surface of a cellular telephone and includes a PIN pad unit and two separate magnetic stripe and smartcard readers. During a transaction, the attachment reads information from a credit card, debit card or smart card using one of the two readers, encrypts the information and transmits the encrypted information to a credit card or other validation site using the voice connection previously established by the telephone. However, the attachment is still required to interface with the cellular telephone or other device through the processor of the other device. Additionally, in at least some embodiments, the attachment requires a separate antenna and/or transceiver. Both of these requirements add expense and reduce modularity of the TransAKT system.
Moreover, in both the integrated systems and the attachment systems, passing the data read in from an input device through the processor of the wireless device raises security issues. For example, in a credit card transaction, an unscrupulous merchant may be able to save a customer's credit card information to the memory in a wireless telephone, PDA or laptop computer in order to conduct future fraudulent transactions.